Share In Ways That Make Us Proud To Participate

Why, exactly, did the famous #ALSIceBucketChallenge raise over $100 million within a couple of months? And what spurred people to support the challenge by creating more than 17 million videos that were viewed more than 10 billion times on Facebook alone?

Inherent in his approach was creating a visual vignette in which others can quickly picture a role they would be proud to play in it. Former movie executive and Tell to Win author Peter Guber calls this crafting a purposeful narrative.

Kramer dubs this “making something crowdworthy.” In keeping with the mutuality mindset of enabling others to feel proud to participate, Human to Human (H2H) advocate, Kramer prefers the term “crowdworthy” rather than “going viral” “because it puts the power into the hands of the people sharing it instead of celebrating the genius behind the person who created it.”

Here are Kramer’s four steps to scaling avid participation in “our” campaign:

“Have a simple human concept’

Create a structured plan

Invite people to the party

Apply the rules of impro

The AILS Ice Bucket concept was a startling, easy-to-replicate stunt: get videoed reacting to the chilling experience of someone dumping buckets of ice over your head.

The plan was a call for action evoked the scarcity nudge to respond quickly. The person featured in the video, who had ice dropped their head, invited three people to emulate the ice bucket dump within twenty-four hours.

Calling on three people, usually friends, replicate the stunt, visibly evoke the “social proof” nudge that made those people proud to participate.

Plus, naming three people each time, rapidly scaled participation, as a virtuous circle does. After all, who wants to feel left out?

As in improv participants could and did add both variations to their version of the stunt – and new charities that could benefit from their doing it. And, as Kramer noted, “Group challenges started emerging in addition to individuals: entire NFL teams were challenging other teams together!” See more at my Forbes column.